Intimation
I feel it is my duty to create something that could not have existed at any prior moment in history, that could only be created right now, at this very moment.
The difficulty is that nothing can really advance.
To create something new, at best, is to give an intimation of the potential that is obstructed, and hence, by a contrast however faint, to draw attention to the obstruction and the pain it induces.
This pain has long since been accepted as insuperable, the means of life directed, wherever possible, to numbing it or distracting from it.
These means may nonetheless be directed, hopelessly, against this obstruction, thereby exacerbating the misery of stagnation, forcing us to confront and recognize it.
It may, ultimately, be nothing new. It may only amount to yet another means of coming to terms with insuperable suffering, or worse, of ignoring it.
But one can hope to indicate that there is something beyond the same old thing, even if it is presently out of reach, and thereby teach others to take up this struggle themselves, however hopelessly, precisely because it may not be hopeless forever.
Joseph Stella, Song of the Nightingale, 1918. Pastel on paper. MoMA.
Things change, and yet, nothing is new under the sun. The same law that has governed human history up to this point — and hence the activity of individual human beings — as a mere extension of natural history, continues to subsume and determine everything we do with our lives: the law of self-preservation.
No one can act against this law, no one can avoid conforming to it as the ultimate end governing their “free” activity, without thereby undermining their own existence.
The new, in the sense of activity free from this necessary condition, cannot objectify itself, cannot attain genuine existence, but exists only in its negation, in the example it makes of itself by undermining and destroying itself.
Nothing really new, in the sense of free from this dominating principle, can exist; that which differs from established precedent will hence always prove to be a trivial variation of the same old thing, whether positively, by serving this end as an element of the life-process of society, or negatively, by exhibiting the penalty for insubordination.
Cueva de las Manos, Perito Moreno, Argentina. The art in the cave is dated between 13,000–9,000 BP. Wikimedia.
Self-preservation in this sense means not merely survival, and certainly not merely the survival of individuals, who are all too often sacrificed in order to sustain the social organism of which they are subordinate parts. It means the survival of society, the perpetuation of social life as the essential condition for individual existence, and social life in a particular historically-developed form.
That there is “nothing new” entails insuperable suffering because the form of social life we are bound to serve, preserve, reproduce, is one that requires each of us (especially, but not only, that majority of people condemned to wage labor as the condition of their subsistence) to renounce and sacrifice the free development of our individuality, our potential to act, to experience, to learn, to create beyond the dictates of material necessity.
The substance of individual existence is the time we have to live. Yet to maintain that existence in its present form, we are obliged to sacrifice the better part of it for the sake of preserving the social organism upon which we depend.
The result is not that we are left with some remainder of freedom as compensation, but that even our “free” time is warped and twisted by the need to preserve ourselves as adequate instruments for social reproduction: we must spend our time off work preparing ourselves to get back to work.
Frontispiece of the 1857 proof of Les Fleurs du mal with notes by Charles Baudelaire. Wikimedia.
Even those who feel a perfect consonance between their own desires and aspirations and their activity in service of social and individual reproduction will only ever know desires and aspirations that were constrained from the outset, and hence, will never know what they might have wanted had it been possible to live otherwise.
Hence, to live is to suffer, even if this suffering goes unrecognized. To exist is to be compelled by the need to preserve one’s individual life to conform as a means to a higher end, and hence, to subject oneself in every aspect of existence to the domination of an external, alien force. To exist is to passively endure domination, to sacrifice the individuality, the unique potential, one essentially is, or rather, would be, were one’s individual existence to be essential rather than accidental, “the free development of each” constituting the condition of “the free development of all”.
We are all grist for the mill or fodder for the cannons, and no matter how we might embrace this condition and even learn to enjoy it, we only thereby console ourselves for a fundamental loss constitutive of our very existence, and numb the pain that reflection on this condition cannot but expose and aggravate. What lives we could have lived, had history only taken a different turn!
William Blake, Minos from the illustrations to Dante’s Divine Comedy, 1824-27. Pen and watercolor over pencil and black chalk. Flashbak.
A friend asks, What if your duty is to create the right thing most needed for this point in history, regardless of whether it could or could not have existed previously or is or is not new? Can value or purpose only be found in the new?
The prevailing order of society indeed imbues life with value and purpose, and defines what is right and what is needed. There may indeed be other, higher values or purposes, there may be a need and a right beyond the preservation and perfection of what exists. But to put things this way is already to limit one’s imagination, to presume that concepts by which we have made sense of our situation (and indeed, that concepts tout court) are adequate to express what it would mean to go beyond social life, and indeed, life, as it has existed up to this point.
The most we can say with any certainty is that the potential exists for a transformation so fundamental that we do not have the capacity to represent it adequately and that the task of realizing this potential, the necessity of doing so, is wholly negative; it emanates not from a potential future but from the past tearing itself asunder, contradicting itself, opening up to a potential change from which it is nonetheless bound to recoil unless we decide to see it through.
It is futile to predict where that leads, because it does not lead in any one direction but opens onto an infinity of courses to be followed, and because no course will be followed out of the familiar compulsion of external necessity but as expressions of a freedom knowing only its own intrinsic necessity, a freedom we cannot know nor understand, but only glimpse as a silhouette against the horizon.
Building of the Tower of Babel; detail of a miniature from the Bedford Hours, c. 1410-30. Wikimedia.
With respect to art, all that I can hope to produce is something that captures and transmits an intimation of the creative freedom that would exist beyond life enslaved to the principle of self-preservation, the compulsion of natural necessity as mediated by social form. And today, it would be ridiculous to expect such an intimation to take the shape of the confident expectation of progressive realization from which the great works of art of the bourgeois epoch derived their glory.
The new is of course illusory, and the appearance of something really new quickly collapses back into the same old shit. But I think it still worthwhile to sustain the illusion while nonetheless refusing to be duped by it, or to try to dupe others. I do not know if I have the skill to even produce such an illusion in the first place, but I will nonetheless try because I believe what is hoped for and found only in illusion should not be forsaken for that fact.
This hope can and should be sustained even in its disappointment and frustration, and this will be all the more likely if these negative circumstances are not denied but recognized and embraced from the outset, so that the misfortune they manifest might be cast in sharper relief. //
David McNew, SpaceX Launch, 2018. Curbed.
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